hanging upside down from the rafters

What the hell am I doing here?

I’m learning to be a writer. I’ve been doing it seriously for nearly 18 months now, and it’s slow going but absolutely the best thing I’ve ever done in my whole life. I thought it might be fun to write about the process in a blog… we’ll see if it works.

How did I get here?

I’ve always been an avid reader, since my parents taught me to read when I was 2 or 3 years old. We didn’t have a TV till I was fourteen, and I was never very sociable, so by the time I was 10 I’d already worked my way through the science fiction section at the local library. Twice.

I love books.

When I was thirteen years old I started to write poetry. It was awful. I mean really bad. You know the sort of thing:

Why is my life so primordially horrible?
Why does everyone hate me?
Why is everything fading abysmally to black?

That’s not an actual example, I haven’t been able to persuade myself to dig the little red-and-black notebook out of the drawer it’s been lurking in for nearly 30 years. I suspect I’d go into writer’s meltdown – the state you get into when you realise that you have no talent and no hope and the only option remaining to you is to chop off your fingers so you can no longer inflict your Vogon-like word combinations on the world.

At the time, of course, I thought I was brilliant. I wrote an essay for English entitled ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ about a suicidal teenager, which Mrs Millard read out to the class. She gave me an A-, which is the highest mark she ever awarded. So clearly I was a misunderstood genius. Ha.

I remember one time I got really angry with my mum for some reason (or more likely no reason), so I let her read my poems. It worked, she cried. (yes, I was a real cow back then) And then she said, ‘I don’t want you to be a scientist.’

I didn’t understand that for years. And by the time I did it was too late, I was a computer programmer, and hadn’t written anything other than psychology essays, a PhD thesis, a few academic papers, letters and emails, and analysis and design documents, for over a decade.

There were still some germs of creativity lurking inside my skull though. The infection took hold slowly, starting with the design of my own cross-stitch patterns for birthday cards, and proceeding to some quite detailed Celtic knotwork drawings. In fact, I have a tattoo of one of them. Oh yes, I’ve always been an incorrigible graffiti-ist (graffitier?), I’ve been in trouble numerous times for writing or drawing on walls, furniture, churches, my dad’s car…

Anyway, having shifted into management at work, and been promoted to a level slightly too far beyond my competence/confidence, I had a bit of a nervous breakdown and was off work for a while at the end of 2007. My wonderful CBT therapist talked me into signing up for a creative writing course, which I loved. The confidence that gave me enabled me to get back to work… within a few weeks I was made redundant.

That had to be a sign. A career change was definitely called for. No jobs for middle managers with out-of-date technical skills anyway. So I started to write a best-selling novel… then thought maybe I should learn how to write properly, and signed up to do a part time degree in Creative Writing at Nottingham University. So far it’s been absolutely amazing… more of that in future blogs! (good god. the spell checker doesn’t recognise ‘blog’!)

Where am I going?

Well, I thought I’d write about my experiences as a writer and a student, partly as a diary for my own interest, partly to practise writing, and possibly even for other people to read.

Also, my brother already has a blog, so he’s beaten me to it – can’t let him be the only published author in our family!